Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Chloe does HB

Chloe is one of the most naturally talented of the young artists who frequent my blog to do exercises.She's been doing studies of WB characters and has now decided to try her hand at HB.I sometimes think it's harder to learn the HB style than the WB style - because it is based on the WB style (so you have to know all that) yet takes some clever liberties in construction and perspective - not on every apsect of every pose, but just in limited areas to help the design. It's hard to know what's on purpose and what might be just a rushed animation drawing.Maybe Chloe can upload the frame grabs she based these studies on and I can give a critique on some of them.I recognize most of these poses - that Barney on the left above is from a Carlo Vinci scene.One important aspect of the HB style is balance of negative VS positive spaces.

I'll give an in depth critique later if Chloe gives me some originals these are based on.

The sense of "volume" or weight in Chloe's drawings is very impressive. Especially since that's what the Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons never had.

One reason I don't like them is that you never see a character turn around in a convincing way— they're either facing right or left in relation to the screen, and that's it.

Then there are the endlessly repeating running cycles (legs in like, three or maybe four positions at most) and backgrounds. Even when I was a little kid and parked in front of the TV, I thought that was lazy... and lousy.

Chloe makes these characters look a lot better and more appealing than they were in the first place, and that takes some considerable talent!

Real nice, but I hope she doesn't lose her hyper-linear, old masters flair entirely. Her early melding of that sensibility and your cartoon characters was wonderful. Nice to see she can follow the method, nonetheless.

I don't know if Dino looks better in my drawing. But thank you anyway.

I suspect that copying is the easy part, figuring out how to actually move Dino would be more tricky.

yes, the precise difficulty with HB is that you're not always sure which parts of the drawing are following consistent rules and which are skilled design cheats or just lazily executed. I tried to pick drawings to copy that were good.

This is interesting for me to see, I've been doing HB studies myself lately but I've been finding them really hard. I feel like I can't get my head round the style at all. It's intriguing to see how much Chloe does those rings around the forms to help define the volume. Maybe I should try that more, I think I get too seduced by the pretend flatness of the style.